Part 3 (1/2)
Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it.
So the Sophistic understanding too had so far become master over the dominant, ancient powers that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in which they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in man.
This war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day of the old world does it end in peace.
The examination of the heart takes its start with Socrates, and all the contents of the heart are sifted. In their last and extremest struggles the ancients threw all contents out of the heart and let it no longer beat for anything; this was the deed of the Skeptics. The same purgation of the heart was now achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding had succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng in the Sophistic age.
The Sophistic culture has brought it to pa.s.s that one's understanding no longer _stands still_ before anything, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no longer _moved_ by anything.
So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarra.s.sed by relations to the world,--and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly,--so long he is not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world and corporality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the Skeptical culture presents him,--so altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling in ruins would not move him,--before he could feel himself as worldless, _i. e._ as spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients: that man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as _spirit_.
Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he all in all to himself, is he only for himself, i. e. he is spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer language, he cares only for the spiritual.
In the Christian wisdom of serpents and innocence of doves the two sides--understanding and heart--of the ancient liberation of mind are so completed that they appear young and new again, and neither the one nor the other lets itself be bluffed any longer by the worldly and natural.
Thus the ancients mounted to _spirit_, and strove to become _spiritual_.
But a man who wishes to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he was able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something to do to the spirit and not to mere sense or acuteness,[10] which exerts itself only to become master of _things_.
The spirit busies itself solely about the spiritual, and seeks out the ”traces of mind” in everything; to the _believing_ spirit ”everything comes from G.o.d,” and interests him only to the extent that it reveals this origin; to the _philosophic_ spirit everything appears with the stamp of reason, and interests him only so far as he is able to discover in it reason, _i. e._ spiritual content.
Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual, with no _thing_, but only with the essence which exists behind and above things, with _thoughts_,--not that did the ancients exert, for they did not yet have it; no, they had only reached the point of struggling and longing for it, and therefore sharpened it against their too-powerful foe, the world of sense (but what would not have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the G.o.ds of the heathen were yet far removed from the conception ”G.o.d is _spirit_,” since the ”heavenly fatherland” had not yet stepped into the place of the sensuous, etc?)--they sharpened against the world of sense their _sense_, their acuteness. To this day the Jews, those precocious children of antiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and forces them to obey it, they cannot discover _spirit_, which _takes no account whatever of things_.
The Christian has spiritual interests, because he allows himself to be a _spiritual_ man; the Jew does not even understand these interests in their purity, because he does not allow himself to a.s.sign _no value_ to things. He does not arrive at pure _spirituality_, a spirituality such as is religiously expressed, _e. g._, in the _faith_, of Christians, which alone (_i. e._ without works) justifies. Their _unspirituality_ sets Jews forever apart from Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible to the unspiritual, as the unspiritual is contemptible to the spiritual. But the Jews have only ”the spirit of this world.”
The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far from the spirit and the spirituality of the Christian world as earth from heaven.
He who feels himself as free spirit is not oppressed and made anxious by the things of this world, because he does not care for them; if one is still to feel their burden, he must be narrow enough to attach _weight_ to them,--as is evidently the case, for instance, when one is still concerned for his ”dear life.” He to whom everything centres in knowing and conducting himself as a free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he is supplied meanwhile, and does not reflect at all on how he must make his arrangements to have a thoroughly free or enjoyable _life_. He is not disturbed by the inconveniences of the life that depends on things, because he lives only spiritually and on spiritual food, while aside from this he only gulps things down like a beast, hardly knowing it, and dies bodily, to be sure, when his fodder gives out, but knows himself immortal as spirit, and closes his eyes with an adoration or a thought. His life is occupation with the spiritual, is--_thinking_; the rest does not bother him; let him busy himself with the spiritual in any way that he can and chooses,--in devotion, in contemplation, or in philosophic cognition,--his doing is always thinking; and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at last become quite clear, could lay down the proposition: ”I think, that is--I am.” This means, my thinking is my being or my life; only when I live spiritually do I live; only as spirit am I really, or--I am spirit through and through and nothing but spirit. Unlucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow, is the portrait of this man become a spirit; for the spirit's body is shadowless.--Over against this, how different among the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they might bear themselves against the might of things, they must yet acknowledge the might itself, and got no farther than to protect their _life_ against it as well as possible.
Only at a late hour did they recognize that their ”true life” was not that which they led in the fight against the things of the world, but the ”spiritual life,” ”turned away” from these things; and, when they saw this, they became--Christians, _i. e._ the moderns, and innovators upon the ancients. But the life turned away from things, the spiritual life, no longer draws any nourishment from nature, but ”lives only on thoughts,” and therefore is no longer ”life,” but--_thinking_.
Yet it must not be supposed now that the ancients were _without thoughts_, just as the most spiritual man is not to be conceived of as if he could be without life. Rather, they had their thoughts about everything, about the world, man, the G.o.ds, etc., and showed themselves keenly active in bringing all this to their consciousness. But they did not know _thought_, even though they thought of all sorts of things and ”worried themselves with their thoughts.” Compare with their position the Christian saying, ”My thoughts are not your thoughts; as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts,”
and remember what was said above about our child-thoughts.
What is antiquity seeking, then? The true _enjoyment of life_! You will find that at bottom it is all the same as ”the true life.”
The Greek poet Simonides sings: ”Health is the n.o.blest good for mortal man, the next to this is beauty, the third riches acquired without guile, the fourth the enjoyment of social pleasures in the company of young friends.” These are all _good things of life_, pleasures of life.
What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants? What else Aristippus, who found it in a cheery temper under all circ.u.mstances?
They are seeking for cheery, unclouded _life-courage_, for _cheeriness_; they are seeking to ”be of good _cheer_.”
The Stoics want to realize the _wise man_, the man with _practical philosophy_, the man who _knows how to live_,--a wise life, therefore; they find him in contempt for the world, in a life without development, without spreading out, without friendly relations with the world, _i. e._ in the _isolated life_, in life as life, not in life with others; only the Stoic _lives_, all else is dead for him. The Epicureans, on the contrary, demand a moving life.
The ancients, as they want to be of good cheer, desire _good living_ (the Jews especially a long life, blessed with children and goods), _eudaemonia_, well-being in the most various forms. Democritus, _e. g._, praises as such the calm of the soul in which one ”_lives_ smoothly, without fear and without excitement.”
So what he thinks is that with this he gets on best, provides for himself the best lot, and gets through the world best. But as he cannot get rid of the world,--and in fact cannot for the very reason that his whole activity is taken up in the effort to get rid of it, that is, in _repelling the world_ (for which it is yet necessary that what can be and is repelled should remain existing, otherwise there would no longer be anything to repel),--he reaches at most an extreme degree of liberation, and is distinguishable only in degree from the less liberated. If he even got as far as the deadening of the earthly sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper of the word ”Brahm,” he nevertheless would not be essentially distinguishable from the _sensual_ man.
Even the Stoic att.i.tude and manly virtue amounts only to this,--that one must maintain and a.s.sert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics (their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it should behave toward the world, and of nature [physics] only this, that the wise man must a.s.sert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-a.s.sertion against the world. And this consists in ”imperturbability and equanimity of life,” and so in the most explicit Roman virtue.
The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no further than this _practical philosophy_.
The _comfort (hedone)_ of the Epicureans is the same _practical philosophy_ the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another _behavior_ toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd att.i.tude toward the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy.